Gender, parenthood, and parliamentary speech: Exploring how socialization and experience shape legislator behaviour

Making speeches in parliament is one of the primary ways elected representatives advocate for policies, engage with constituents’ concerns, and shape public discourse. An emerging literature has explored how gender shapes parliamentary speech, revealing differences between women and men in terms of frequency, style and policy content (Alemán et al., 2025; Bäck and Debus 2019; Castanho Silva, Pullan, and Wäckerle 2023; Hargrave and Blumenau 2024; Rayment 2024). What remains somewhat less settled in these studies are the mechanisms motivating parliamentary speech: are differences in men’s and women’s legislative speech mainly due to gender role socialization, distinct experiences, or institutional effects? Some studies link women’s distinctive speech to gender role socialization and role congruity theory (Bäck and Debus 2019; Hargrave and Lonegan 2021; Raiber and Spierings 2022), while others point to the common experiences women share (Alemán et al., 2025). Political behaviour research offers important insights into how experience, especially experiences associated with parenting, shape policy attitudes. Studies show that parenthood is a transformative life event that reshapes citizens’ political attitudes, behaviours, and policy preferences, but with different effects on mothers compared to fathers (Burlacu and Lühiste 2021; Greenlee 2014; Naurin, Stolle, and Markstedt 2023; Naurin et al., 2025). Our paper brings together research on women’s parliamentary speech and literature on gender, parenthood, and political behaviour, asking whether mothers and fathers in parliament invoke parenthood with the same frequency and when speaking about similar or different policy issues. We use the Linked Parliamentary Data Project (LiPaD), a comprehensive digitized corpus of all speeches delivered in the Canadian House of Commons, focusing specifically on six parliaments from 2001 to 2019. We ask two questions: 1) Do women and men invoke their parenthood identities with similar frequency? and 2) Which policy issues are men and women speaking about when they reference their identities as parents? Using computational text analysis, we first isolate speeches in which members invoke their parenthood explicitly, for example, saying “as a father,” or “my daughter.” Next, we use an unsupervised machine learning model to categorize speeches into distinct policy domains. Finally, we estimate regression models to assess whether gender differences in the likelihood of invoking parenthood persist after accounting for institutional and partisan context. Detecting differences in frequency of parenthood invocations could reveal a socialization mechanism shaping speech. For instance, if women reference their parenthood identities more frequently than men, it might indicate efforts to generate authority through gender role congruency. If men and women invoke parenthood when speaking about specific issues, we might be able to connect parliamentary speech to distinct gendered experiences of parenting. In sum examining gender, parenthood, and parliamentary speech could reveal the various sources of differences in women and men’s parliamentary behaviour.